Recent studies have shown that at least one-half of Internet traffic is users watching videos on video streaming sites, with over four billion of hours of videos being viewed in just the first quarter of 2013. Most users view videos in a web browser application, such as Apple Inc.'s SAFARI™ web browser, or similar web browser applications from other providers. Existing web browsers are designed to access all types of web pages, and are not restricted to just viewing pages with videos embedded or linked therein. Existing web browsers typically provide a history display that shows or lists the web pages that the user has recently visited. The display includes typically all of the web pages the user visited, including both pages providing access to a video that the user viewed (“video pages”) in the browser, as well as other web pages from blogs, news sites, commerce sites, and so forth that may have no video on the pages at all, but just text and/or graphics. Thus, if the user is looking for a specific recently watched video, the user must sift through all of the recently visited pages in the history display to locate that specific video page, and then from there reload the video page into the browser in order to view the video again. This is time consuming for the user, and does not provide a mechanism for readily browsing only video pages and accessing previously viewed videos.
Second, in the conventional history display, each web page is represented by a small scale rendering of the visible web page content (e.g., a “thumbnail”) so that user sees the context of the entire web page as a reminder of its content. This is the case for both video pages and non-video pages: other content on a video page, such as text, banners, sidebars, advertisements, links to other videos, graphics, and like are shown in reduced form as well. Given the limited size of a thumbnail, the portion of that image that is of the video itself, may be very small, perhaps only dozens of pixels in height and width. As a result, when the user is reviewing a conventional history display to find video pages, the salient information about the prior viewing experience—the video itself—is buried in the context of irrelevant information.